Hard drive vs. CF cards

I've been doing my searching and I know some people are gonna say both but here's my issues :

I want to get a HD just because of having mass storage available but I see a lot of people talking about getting errors w/ 'em and I wouldn't want 80+ gigs of sh!t and then just have the drive take a dive on me . And a lot of people are saying they're slower than CF cards . But getting a 80+ GB HD is cheaper than getting a couple 8 or 16 GB cards . I'm also not seeing where I can partition so after a while it'd be a lot of sh!t to go through .

I want CF cards because I'm used to smaller storage from my 2K's and it seems easier and more reliable but also more expensive .

Out of experience what do you guys recommend ?

I use the HD only because I already installed it and payed $20 for it.

But from experience the SanDisk Ultra II cards work great. Very reliable and they load up fast. But yes they are very expensive.

Let me look through my stuff and see if I got some laying around because at one point I had about 4 of those SanDisk Ultra II 4gbs... I have one and I gave one to DJ Hellfire and the other two I gotta find.

If I find one I will definatly sell it to you for a fraction of the price.

Oh they even have Extreme Ultra III's now!!!

Good lookin' out . I see a lot of people saying Kingston is good too and after looking on eBay they're a lot cheaper (about 1/2 the price) . Have you tried 'em out ?

I havent tried those kingston ones.

I wont through my stuff and didnt come across those CF cards.

I like my hd. No changing disks and stuff like that, my complete sound library plus all my beats on it.

Menco wrote:I like my hd. No changing disks and stuff like that, my complete sound library plus all my beats on it.

When you plug in the USB does the HD show up on your desktop like an external (probably a stupid ? but I have to ask before I drop loot this weekend) ? If so I might just do both . Get a HD and back all my pgm's & sounds up and then use the card for all my beats . So then I can have all my beats ready to go but have all my "go to" sh!t right in the MPC .

It might sound weird but that's how I did it on my 2K . Had all my pgm's & sounds on separate disks and then I picked and chose sounds that my pgm's for beats had and then saved on another disk w/ the seq . I.E. after chopping a sample in one pgm, I'd load a drum pgm and then pick the drums I wanted and assign then to the pgm w/ the sample chops and that would be a beat pgm . Sounds meticulous but it saved mad space back in the days of floppies and that's my work flow now .

i use to use the cf cards until i got a new computer, which doesnt have the cf drive,

I ordered a hard drive before the MPC itself arrived in the mail without even thinking about it...

shottz. wrote:i use to use the cf cards until i got a new computer, which doesnt have the cf drive,

why not just buy a card reader? I got one from eBay for a few bucks

poundaproblem wrote:why not just buy a card reader? I got one from eBay for a few bucks

Co-sign the card reader, MUCH faster than backing up through the USB option.

And while I'm mentioning speed... Go for the Sandisk Extreme III or equivalent. I did tests vs. my Sandisk Ultra II card, and the joint is on average THREE times faster loading/saving in the MP. You will notice a difference even jumping through folders.

elevated wrote:And while I'm mentioning speed... Go for the Sandisk Extreme III or equivalent. I did tests vs. my Sandisk Ultra II card, and the joint is on average THREE times faster loading/saving in the MP. You will notice a difference even jumping through folders.

Oh really!

Dope. I have Ultra II's and I think those are fast! But if the Extremes are that much faster then its worth it!

i use a hard drive on mine
3 years strong right now. it gets backed up every few days tho just in case
i thought about getting an SSD drive
maybe one of these, i know its not much space and a lil on the xpensive side, but at least it won't have any moving parts inside the mpc.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820208445

i'm afraid my HDD will take a crizap one of these days with all the pad banging on the MP.

temetrepo wrote:i'm afraid my HDD will take a crizap one of these days with all the pad banging on the MP.

I wouldn't worry about that, they have to stand similar stress in a laptop too. And usually by the time you get to banging the pads, the drive has already spinned down.

Im use both myself.
I dont notice much of a speed difference at all between the CF and the HD other than waiting a second or two for the HD to spin up when idle. Like when I wanna load something and hit Mode+PAD2 it takes about 2 seconds.
The CF card is INSTANT.

I use the CF card alot to xfer sounds between the pc and the mpc.
I save all of my sounds and projects on the HD. And every week or two I either load my projects from my HD and save to my CF card to backup on my pc HD, or in cases where I have smaller folders I use the USB from the mpc to the PC to do that xfer.

My main CF card is a Kingston 8GB 133X card. and I have an 80GB Seagate HD in there as well.

Once the price of SSD's come down I will probably run one of them.

But in the meantime, I bought this IDE to CF card adapter to install in my HD10M tray and I have been planning on getting a 32gb or 64gb Fast CF card and using this in place of my HDD..